Abstract

The Role of Comparison in Social Cognition Organizers: Christian Hoyos & Dedre Gentner Northwestern University, [email protected], [email protected] Discussant: Theodore Bach Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University Firelands, Huron, OH, USA Contributors: Andrew N. Meltzoff Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA Stella Christie, Zachary Murphy, & Averill Obee Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA Valerie San Juan 1 , Kelly O’Driscoll 2 , & Patricia Ganea 2 Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Christian Hoyos, William S. Horton, & Dedre Gentner Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA Keywords: comparison; analogy; theory of mind; social cognition; imitation; like me hypothesis implications of this work for social cognition and theories of comparison. Motivation Infant Imitation and the “Like-Me” Hypothesis for Developing Human Social Cognition How does comparison affect the way we think of others? Comparison has been shown to be a powerful learning tool in a variety of conceptual domains, ranging from basic spatial relations, to concepts in algebra and heat flow (e.g., Gentner, 2010). Comparison recruits a structure-mapping process that highlights common relational structure between two situations. It helps novice learners see meaningful similarities and differences which can then be transferred to novel situations. This process can help infants and children move beyond the particular features of any one situation and gain a more abstract understanding of complex concepts. While comparison has been established as an important tool in cognitive development, less work has illustrated how it may function as a key process in the social domain. The goal of this symposium will be to show how these benefits of comparison can also influence the development of social cognition. We bring together empirical work addressing comparison in infancy through early childhood to illustrate how this basic process has profound effects throughout social cognitive development. A. Meltzoff will discuss the kinds of mapping processes that underpin the “Like me” hypothesis. S. Christie will show how comparison can guide imitation in young children. C. Hoyos will present work showing that explicitly asking children to compare mental states can aid false belief understanding. V. San Juan will examine how language can invite comparison across instances to improve false belief reasoning. We will end with a discussion by T. Bach on the Andrew N. Meltzoff Newborn humans imitate facial gestures they have never seen themselves make. There is a tight coupling between perception and production that allows newborns to cross- modally map gestures they see another perform and their own unseen acts. I will explore the mechanisms underlying such interpersonal mapping, and articulate the “Like-Me” hypothesis about the roots of human social cognition. According to this view, preverbal social learning is facilitated by infants’ identification of others as “like me.” This allows human infants to rapidly learn about physical laws and social conventions through observing the actions of other people. In addition to manipulating the world themselves, children learn simply from watching and imitating experts in their culture. Human infants exploit others as proxies, a strategy that multiplies their learning opportunities prior to taking action themselves. They learn from the trial and error and insights of others. I will draw on various research studies in developmental psychology to make these ideas concrete, and will discuss more general theoretical lessons for the formation of human social cognition.